Oracle Makes Statement To Assuage All Fears About Sun Products

Those who suspect all large mergers, and are fearful of what is the fate of Sun and all of its properties can rest easy if the press release from Oracle is to be believed. Giving a bright outlook for all the various parts of Sun, and a few specifics, the article in InfoWorld also gives reason to believe that Open Office too, will be be alright.

The GlassFish application server will be repositioned to address departmental needs, while the strategic Oracle WebLogic Server product will remain targeted at enterprise customers requiring performance and scalability. Longtime readers will recognize this strategy as one we’ve been using in the application server market with WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and WebSphere Application Server. It’s a smart move on Oracle’s part — as we’ve found and as MySQL and Oracle DB usage shows, customers have different middleware needs for different projects.

MySQL will continue to receive investment and be managed within the separate open source division at Sun, but it will have a separate sales force. Hopefully this is temporary and MySQL will be managed and sold by the Fusion Middleware division in the near future.

There has been a great deal of trepidation over this, and I have gotten quite a few letters asking for my help should MySQL not be continued. This product has much more grass roots support than anything else I have ever seen. Many people will be most happy about this.

Recall that that GlassFish and WebLogic Server, which compete on paper but address different use cases, will be sold by the same sales force. More specifically, GlassFish will be sold by the sales team responsible for Oracle’s strategic Fusion Middleware suite, yet Oracle has decided to put MySQL and Oracle DB into separate divisions and assign a separate sales team to MySQL.

OpenOffice will continue to receive investment and be managed within a separate business unit. There will be a focus on integrating OpenOffice with business intelligence and content management offerings.

Open Office will continue, which is a big relief to many, including me. What is not mentioned in five articles written on various sites is whether Sun Office will continue as a paid product. Also, no mention of what will happen to IBM’s Symphony product, which is based upon Open Office.

Oracle announced that it provides Linux and Linux support to more than 4,000 customers. The company expects to accelerate Sun’s Solaris efforts, but target its investment to drive Solaris further into mission-critical workloads, while focusing less on x86 or the SMB market. While Oracle didn’t say this specifically, one has to wonder if Oracle’s Solaris investments will regulate (I think he means relegate) Linux to something less than “mission critical” workloads, at least alongside Oracle DB.

Not mentioned here, but in other stories about this are complete statements that Solaris will continue, and in renewed vigor, as Oracle wants to be able to sell Sun Sparc servers, running Solaris, and on top of that Oracle databases. Those stories also gave assurance that Solaris would remain open and free.